IBM to provide supercomputing capability to “Big Oil”

By
08.30.2004 :: 10:19AM EST

Apparently the production and exploration wing of the oil industry is exhausting the computing abilities of IBM's Deep Computing Capacity on Demand centers. In response, IBM will be opening a brand new computing center in Houston, Texas, where its lead-off customer will be Landmark Graphics, a company owned by the ever-so-controversial Halliburton Corporation. The artillery provided by IBM will start off with a clustered set of 512 IBM xSeries Xeon servers, each supporting up to 16 GB of DDR2 memory. IBM's hardware will, of course, be very scalable in case the computing services required exceed the expectation. The primary computing application will be seismic processing, which, let's face it, just sounds cool. It consists of extremely high resolution 2D/3D signal processing used for performing analysis of subsurface geoscience structures (i.e., underground and underwater rock stuff). IBM will sell computing capacity to its customers based upon computing power used, which only makes me wonder how much IBM would charge to run my brute force attacks …

USER COMMENTS 3 comment(s)

I'm null minded.(11:50am EST Mon Aug 30 2004)I wonder how much IBM would charge me to make a cluster to run Doom 3 at top frame rates? – by Aleph Null